Word.ws English Dictionary

handwaved

handwaved is the simple past and past participle of handwave.

Meaning of handwave

Verb

handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)

  1. (rhetoric) To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
    • Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction, page 33

See all 3 meanings of handwave

Questions about handwaved

What is handwaved the simple past and past participle of?
Handwaved is the simple past and past participle of handwave.

Words near handwaved in the dictionary

  1. handwashers
  2. handwashes
  3. handwashing
  4. handwashings
  5. handwave
  6. handwaved
  7. handwaver
  8. handwavers
  9. handwaves
  10. handwavey
  11. handwaving

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: handwaved (page history and authors); handwave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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